Zoo program key to state’s effort to return native New England cottontails to the wild

Friday

Apr 18, 2014 at 9:53 PM

It’s that time of spring when a certain long-eared, nose-twitching, cute and furry rabbit is closely watched. But take a seat at the mall, Easter bunny.

Richard Salit Journal Staff Writer richsalit

It’s that time of spring when a certain long-eared, nose-twitching, cute and furry rabbit is closely watched. But take a seat at the mall, Easter bunny. This is a story about the New England cottontail.

While the hoppity holiday hare is seemingly everywhere at Easter, New England’s true native rabbit has been missing for many years — unlike its nearly identical cousin, the Eastern cottontail, commonly seen in backyards and fields.

That’s why for the past several springs attention has been focused on the quiet, sunlit rooms of a small building at Roger Williams Park Zoo. Here, a first-of-its-kind breeding program is showing promise that New England cottontails can be raised in captivity and released into the wild.

In fact, over the past couple of years, the offspring have been let go on Patience Island in Narragansett Bay, raising hopes that a colony can be established and populations begun elsewhere in the state.

But for that to happen, still more cottontails need to be birthed at the zoo during the key breeding weeks in early spring.

“We’ve already had three babies born this week — the [season’s] first litter,” said Louis Perrotti, the zoo’s director of conservation programs. “We continue to crank out bunnies.”

The program has been so successful that, like a burgeoning singles resort, more of what Perrotti likes to call “honeymoon suites” have been added to the building. Here, a female rabbit, or doe, is paired with a male and placed in one of the rooms filled with hay, boxes and tubes.

Now, with several of these rooms, it’s hoped that the 16 adults will do what they do best — breed like rabbits.

All across the region, populations of New England cottontails have long been in a slump. Things were so bad as far back as the 1930s, that non-native Eastern cottontails from the South were reportedly imported to New England by the hundreds of thousands.

Now the Easterns, considered to be less skittish, may be out-competing what few native rabbits are left for an ever-dwindling amount of prime habitat, according to Brian Tefft, a wildlife biologist with the state Department of Environmental Management.

Surveys conducted by the University of Rhode Island have produced disheartening results in recent years. Every winter, teams collect rabbit droppings and analyze their DNA. While signs of New England cottontails were once regularly found in several southern communities in Rhode Island, there was a more recent stretch where none were found at all, Tefft said.

In the past couple of years, there have been woefully few positive results, including last year’s two in South Kingstown and one in Narragansett.

Such dismal findings gave rise to a partnership between the zoo, the DEM and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The service is overseeing a number of projects across New England to conserve the New England cottontail, according to Anthony Tur, a biologist based in the agency’s field office in New Hampshire.

Only in Rhode Island is breeding taking place, using wild adults caught out of state. This year’s come from western Connecticut.

In 2011, 11 babies survived. The following year, the number rose to 28. And last year, the program produced 42 offspring.

“I’d like to double last year,” said Perrotti.

While some of the babies were sent to New Hampshire, the rest went to a so-called “acclimation pen” at the Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge in Charlestown.

“Once born and weaned, they come down to the pen to learn how to forage wild vegetation,” said wildlife biologist Cynthia Maynard.

From Ninigret, the bunnies have been ferried to 210-acre Patience Island, off Prudence Island. Surveys found no signs of rabbits on the island beforehand and the type of low scrub that they prefer, good for hiding from predators, Tefft said.

Tags and microchips are attached to the rabbits to help identify and track them. But some of the best information comes from gathering rabbit fecal pellets and using DNA analysis to confirm they are offspring from the zoo.

“We make several visits a year to the island to check up on them,” said Tefft, adding that the severe weather limited visits this past winter. “I am happy to report there is good survival.”

In fact, with about 30 rabbits now believed to be inhabiting Patience Island, the survival is better than 50 percent, Tefft said. He soon hopes to find evidence that some of the rabbits on the island were actually born there.

“We’re hoping they do their natural rabbit thing and reproduce,” Tefft said. “We’d like to see about 400 to 500 rabbits out there.”

Only when the colony is well established will efforts begin to transplant some of the cottontails to suitable parts of the state to try and start other colonies, Tefft said.

“Our plan is coming together,” Perrotti said. “We’re working toward a very successful program to put this rabbit back in the wild.”